Choosing between God and Satan
I was involved in a discussion recently in the comment thread of this post, and I found myself using an analogy that in retrospect was pretty accurate for clarifying my position. We were discussing whether atheists don’t believe in God because they want an excuse to live lives without any morals. (I’m sure there are some people who call themselves atheists for this reason. There are also some people who dress in all black and act really morbid just to spite their parents. Those people aren’t really part of the goth subculture, just as these people aren’t really atheists.)
The people arguing that atheists are just trying to skirt morality are working from the premise that morals can only come from God, and without Him and the threat of eternal damnation we’d all be terrible people. (Weren’t we just talking about that?) Someone pointed out, as evidence that atheists hate doing good, the fact that some atheists had previously stated that if God were to exist they wouldn’t worship Him. Clearly, he argued, they were just rebelling against God and his morals. I answered:
We disagree on what makes someone/something deserving of praise (or worship).
Christians: Assuming the God of the Bible exists, He ought to be obeyed and worshipped.
Atheists: [some, not all] Even if that God existed, based on what the Bible says about him I’m not sure he’s worthy of worship.The Bible says that God wants us to worship Him, and that He is omnipotent and omniscient. Omnipotence is a pretty intimidating concept, and I can see why someone would agree to submit to that unquestioningly. However, some of us find some Biblical teachings to be morally repugnant. I’m not inclined to worship anyone more powerful than I am just because of their power; instead I look at what they do with their power and how good I think it is.
The other person then asked me what I thought constituted worship-worthiness. I thought I had explained it right there, but I guess it wasn’t clear. What follows is the analogy that I used to make the the point to him. It’s written a bit better and more thoroughly than in the comment thread, of course. (Forgive me if this is a really well-known strategy already; I did a bit of searching and couldn’t find anything that was really expressing this idea, so I figured it could be potentially helpful to get out there for other people stuck in the same conversational impasse.)
I acknowledge that if there were to be some clear proof that God exists, with all the stipulations of typical Christian theology (e.g. omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence), I’d probably have no choice but to worship Him. If there were incontrovertible proof that He really does decree what’s objectively right and wrong, no matter how nonintuitive his judgments are, that’s just the way reality works… I think I’d follow those rules. Obviously, I have a hard time imagining such a scenario, because of various paradoxes required by such a being’s existence. (Can an omnipotent being make a boulder so heavy he cannot lift it? and so on.) I have less trouble imagining an extremely powerful God, one whose abilities far surpass anything a human is capable of. I can certainly understand a being like that not being worthy of worship.
I realize most theists would probably stop me right here and argue with me about the many properties of God which are infinite. Bear with me, though. All that’s necessary for the purposes of this argument is that we agree that at the very least, to humans, infinite power and extremely vast power are indistinguishable. If someone comes to you and says they’re God, and they can perform tons of apparent miracles, that’s pretty compelling, right? Even if they didn’t perform a literally infinite number of miraculous acts.
Now, consider Satan, the Devil. Satan, we’re told, is not omnipotent but is extremely powerful. In stories, he often tries to trick people into thinking that he’s looking out for their best interests. He appears in Revelations 13 pretending to be God and demanding worship. So let’s imagine that two beings manifest themselves to you, both claiming to be God, and both demonstrating extreme power, far beyond your comprehension. How do you tell them apart?
You have to look at what they do and say. How does each one use such power? Presumably they have some commandments for you. Perhaps one tells you to love your neighbors, to care for the less fortunate, to treat others how you would want to be treated. Maybe the other one tells you that if your child talks back to you, you ought to kill him, and that it’s honorable to offer your daughters up to be raped by an angry mob. So you take those commandments, and you evaluate how good they are, how morally upstanding they would make a person who followed them. You can imagine doing that, right? Even without knowing which set of commandments belonged to God, the supposed arbiter of all morality. My guess is that you’d pick the first one to worship as God, and the second one to shun as Satan. The second one sounds pretty awful.
Here’s the thing, though. All of those things are in the Bible, said by God or people speaking with his endorsement. The first set sounds familiar, I’m sure, but killing unruly children is laid out in Exodus, the story of Lot is right there in Genesis, and the apostle Peter later calls Lot just and righteous (2:7-8)… so you can’t claim that you’re just using the commandments of the God you already know to pick the hypothetical God in this example. There’s more where that came from, too, as I said in the comment thread:
I wouldn’t call a deity “benevolent” if they would think it’s good to kill everyone and start fresh every time a few people started misbehaving. I don’t approve of stoning to death as a punishment for anything. I don’t see any moral problem with homosexuality. I doubt that a benevolent God would set up a society with women inferior to men rather than equals, or that He would proclaim everyone to be tainted with original sin.
Even if you disagree with some of the particular cases, the general point is clear. We are able to look at rules and principles and judge them on criteria that are not derived from God.
The easy but weak analogy to make here is to a brutal dictator. Insert your choice of cliché example. Obviously, people condemn his regime because they look at what he did with extreme power and realize its moral repugnance. Reductio ad Hitlerium is so overused that people will overlook a situation where the analogy really is apt, so I think this sort of God vs. Satan challenge is a better trope to use. I’m not arguing that Satan might really be the good one, and God the bad one. If the Bible is entirely true, the Christian God is the one we ought to worship. However, this example makes clear the fact that moral judgments are something we are capable of, outside the scope of any deity’s commandments.
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3 Responses to “Choosing between God and Satan”
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That’s a pretty good summation of the atheist perspective I think. Theists tend to forget that for us each alleged God is equally valid/invalid and must be evaluated if we are (forced?) to choose one to follow.
I’m familiar with a substantially similar argument framed like this:
“Say you know that God wrote the bible, but also know that Satan got to it and inserted passages before you could read it. How would you tell which was written by God and which by Satan?”
Followed by much the same reasoning as you just outlined. A very useful technique.
[...] principles regardless of your belief in God, or in the absence of a god’s commandments, in Choosing between God and Satan. So let’s imagine that two beings manifest themselves to you, both claiming to be God, and both [...]
What a horrible thought – to discover that an omnipotent, egomaniacal, blood-thirsty, emotionally immature tyrant is real.
But isn’t the question of whether I would worship him moot? If he’s all-powerful, it’s his choice, not mine. He could make me worship him. Hell, he could make me believe in him.
A more interesting question is “What would it be like to be omnipotent?” My guess: BORING. I would be like playing tic tac toe with a 5-year-old.